10 Forgotten Video Game Franchises That Need to Make a Comeback

Everyone has bound to have felt this way at one stage over the course of their gaming life: You get really into a great game, perhaps even its sequels too, and you’re eagerly await the follow-up. You wait and wait, though for some reason or another, the game franchise just falls off the face of the earth and you never hear about it again, even though the previous games were definitely worthy of a continuation. Bummer, huh?

With that firmly in mind, let’s take a look at some games from back in the day that really deserve to make a comeback, each one a classic in its own right. Besides, bringing back one of these franchises would really beat the yearly updates of Call of Duty and FIFA, don’t you think?

10. Jumping Flash

This was one of the very first games I played when I got my Playstation. It was released way back in 1995 and was a platformer viewed from a first person perspective. The plot was completely ridiculous in a way that made it so unique. Baron Aloha, an evil astrophysicist, went crazy and used giant, land-lifting machines to remove chunks of other planets to recreate his own private resort planet and has hidden away things called Jet Pods, which propel the planets. Universal City Hall catch wind of Aloha’s evil scheme and dispatch one of their agent’s a robotic bunny called Robbit to find the Jet Pods and to stop Baron Aloha.

No crazy megalomaniac is complete without his own army of evil minions and said minions in this game are called “MuuMuus,” small, white five-limbed creatures who have palm trees on their heads for some unknown reason. After you clear each world, these MuuMuu’s are seen discussing their defeat at the hands of Robbit.

The gameplay was simplistic but extremely fun. The main attack available to Robbit is his ability to execute triple jumps, launching himself high in the air. The camera tilted downwards allowing you to plan where you could land – normally on top of enemies. It’s also possible to chain these jump attacks together. You have a basic attack which is firing out missiles and there are also various other power-ups throughout the world such as rockets, roman candles and cherry bombs. The level designs were also commendable due to their huge variety, from an Egyptian style world to my personal favorite: a huge theme park world. In each of the worlds, too, there were secret levels where you were tasked with popping balloons. The reason? No-one knows. And they didn’t care either.

Why it needs a comeback:

For the simple fact that this game was a hell of a lot of fun. It was released with positive scores though the likes of Super Mario 64 overshadowed it in later years. Bringing this up to date would be a refreshing change, mainly due to the first person platformer element.

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Daniel McMurtry is a video game and film enthusiast from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is currently studying media at college and also dabbles in film making. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/DanielMcMurtry

Discussion

17 Comments

Agree with all of these choices. Definitely think Abe deserves a run on the next gen consoles. I’ve been calling for TimeSplitters to return for so long now, and my fingers are still lightly crossed in desperate anticipation this will happen some day.
Great article.

So agree with Time Splitters, I still remember arguments with friends over Time Splitters: Future Perfect. I maintain that the game, at least gameplay wise in multiplayer was on par or better than Halo. The only reason that people didn’t take it as seriously were the cartoon characters which dampened the seriousness of the game.

I’d love a new Dino Crisis – those games went so wrong. The first one was just like Resident Evil with dinos and that was good enough. The second one went all actiony (where Resi is at now) and the less said about the crud on the original xbox the better. Dino Stalker wasn’t bad, but I’d like a new true survival horror please Capcom!